Written descriptions and photographs cannot fully prepare you for the Stoney Raise cairn, it is immense.
If you approach the cairn from the east you pass through a deserted settlement of undated stone-walled hut circles and Medieval houses. I assume that the stone used in the settlement was taken from the cairn, add to this the stone that was probably taken from the cairn to build the dry stone field boundary walls and you get some idea of how large this cairn was when it was originally built in the Late Neolithic/Early Bronze Age.
This monument has been described as belonging to the Great Barrow Class, a class of monuments that includes the Great Barrows of the Yorkshire Wolds and Wessex, but this is the Pennine uplands, there are no rolling fields of chalk downland here. So why?
If you stand upon the cairn and look west you can see Wild Boar Fell and the eastern margins of Cumbria. If you look east you can see the Tabular hills on the margins of the North York Moors. East meets west at Stoney Raise cairn.
Paulus, Rich and I also discussed other possibilities. The nearby prehistoric settlements at Addlebrough are on the slopes of a huge natural monument. The settlements at Caperby had the Great Limestone Scar to mark their lands. Perhaps the people who inhabited the Greenber Edge settlement felt that they also needed to make a dramatic statement in the landscape to announce their presence.
In the 1933 book, The Archaeology of Yorkshire, F & HW Elgee quote a book by Waley called, The History of Askrigg, which states that a skeleton in a cist was found at Stoney Raise Cairn.
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